Please. Stay. I want you. I need you. Oh, God.

Call me old-fashioned, but I only want my sons to marry women with dead mothers. It’s my only shot at staying relevant, of seeming useful, and of winning by comparison. Having boys is a mind fuck. It builds you up, only to tear you apart.

I’m not a stay-at-home mom; I have a job, a dog, and twelve to fifteen things I’m considering buying off the Real Real at all times. But none of that seems to matter, because as a mother of sons, the red pill and the blue pill both lead to the same place: OBLIVION.

I used to find it insane that my mother-in-law fell apart when Jason told her we were getting married. Now, I understand it had nothing to do with my cat allergy or whether or not I touched her lasagna. I was eating her son, straight out of the fridge, without even asking for a plate.

Not long ago (read: last week), I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without my kids following. They still need me to fall asleep, go to school, interpret the world, cut it up into small, digestible bites, and spoon-feed it to them before seven-fifteen am each morning. We have a short hand, a long hand, and a second language that Jason still luckily doesn’t understand. But these baby remoras, these emotional vampires- the most emotionally high-maintenance men I’ve ever dated are growing up. And eventually, I will lose them.

When I was young, I was every mother’s nightmare. I dismantled boys by accident, I destroyed their lives, wrote about it extensively, then got personally offended when they no longer wanted to be my friend. I said, “I love you,” when I didn’t mean it. I sometimes kissed people just to make them go away. I’ve never been broken up with. I've never been into someone who wasn’t just slightly more into me. But now karma is going to make me pay in spades!!!! Most likely in the form of some crazy bitch who is going to weaponize my flaws in therapy and melt all my jewelry. Her mom will be the one to watch the grandkids and join them for family vacations. I’ll be the lonely old woman wandering the Grove on Fairfax, waiting for my five pm table for one at the fucking Marmalade cafe.

Several months ago, my eldest was texting with a girl, she was twelve, but I could already tell my brand of toxic. She was bossing him around and using big words, and he was utterly spun. I complained to Jason that I wanted to intervene before he got hurt and that she wasn’t even hotter than me. But Jason insisted I let him make his own mistakes. And objectively, he’s right. But as a mother, you want to shield and protect and fiercely defend the thing you’ve devoted your life to shaping. There is so much anticipatory grief wrapped into motherhood. It will trigger even the most well-adjusted of women. But the abandonment we eventually endure as boy moms is uniquely cruel because it begins as worship. They arrive obsessed. Dependent. Adoring. They think we’re magic. We think we are magic.

We spend years being the center of their emotional world, only to slowly watch them build one without us. If we do our job correctly, they leave. That’s sort of the evolution of all things. And maybe that is the harder pill to swallow. Maybe the tragedy of sons is also the gift: the temporary delusion that you can be all things to another person. That there is no competition for their love, no caveats to their devotion.

Today, they’re still little. They still crawl into my sweaters and into my sheets. They still need me to open milk cartons and operate on invisible injuries. I’m still in it, but also somehow outside of it, fully aware I am living through the longest goodbye of my life. I pray that at least one of them is gay.